No option when Allah and his Messenger have decreed a matter

Andrew Gilligan tells us that the Muslim Council of Britain says…well actually I’m not sure what he tells us it says, and I can’t find the statement itself so that I can say what it says as opposed to what Gilligan says. Frankly he could have done a better job with this – he should have included a link and he should have put the crucial bit inside quotation marks so that we would know who said what. As it is it isn’t clear. The words “women,” “niqab,” and “veil” are not inside quotation marks, so I’m left wondering exactly what the MCB said.

Here’s Gilligan’s unhelpful summary:

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said that not covering the face is a “shortcoming” and suggested that any Muslims who advocate being uncovered could be guilty of rejecting Islam.

In a statement published on its website the MCB, warns: “We advise all Muslims to exercise extreme caution on this issue, since denying any part of Islam may lead to disbelief.

“Not practising something enjoined by Allah and his Messenger… is a shortcoming. Denying it is much more serious.”

See? You can’t tell what the MCB said! Gilligan didn’t even specify “not covering the face” is a “shortcoming” for women, so we can’t tell if the MCB said that. Sloppy; very sloppy.

I can’t find the statement on the MCB site, either; maybe they’ve taken it down now. I can find lots of people quoting Gilligan, but not the primary source. This is annoying.

At any rate – if the MCB did say what Gilligan seems to be saying they did, that’s interesting and worth noting. The quoted passage from the Koran is a flawless bit of theocratic tyranny:

The statement quotes from the Koran: “It is not for a believer, man or woman, that they should have any option in their decision when Allah and his Messenger have decreed a matter.”

In other words, “believers” (who are not allowed to stop being “believers,” don’t forget, on pain of summary execution) have to do whatever clerics tell them to do. Period.

Other signatories of the statement include Imran Waheed, spokesman of the extremist group Hizb ut Tahrir and several other extremists including Haitham al-Haddad, who has denounced music as a “prohibited and fake message of love and peace”. All 27 signatories, who describe themselves as “Islamic groups and scholars,” are male.

Well, I also describe myself as an Islamic group and scholar; I declare a fatwa on any Islamic group or scholar that forces a woman to cover her face over badly worded verses in the Koran that are open to multiple, contradictory interpretations.

Ah, thank you, Stephen! I was hoping someone would do further digging for me. I opened a lot of things on the MCB site and then gave up.

It doesn’t quite exactly say what Gilligan implies – which may be why he didn’t quote it directly. It clearly wants to (the authors want to), but it weasels. It weasels a lot. It avoids saying, exactly, “all Muslim women have to wear the niqab.” It nevertheless does everything short of saying that.

Here us what Michael Gove has to say about the MCB in his book Celsius 7/7:

“As the BBC’s John Ware pointed out in his groundbreaking Panorama investigation into the MCB, ‘A Question of Leadership’, broadcast in August 2005, the Council has drawn intellectual nourishment from some worrying sources. One of the most important and influential affiliates of the MCB is the Islamic Foundation in Leicester. The Foundation was set up in the UK in 1974 and was instrumental in creating tthe MCB. The Foundation exists to support and propagate the beliefs of the Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Mawdudi. The Chairman and Rector of the Foundation, Professor Khurshid Ahmad, is also Vice-President of the party Mawdudi founded in Pakistan, the Jamaat-i-Islami.

Mawdudu’s thought, as was outlined at the beginning of this book, is a key influence on Islamists and Jihadis across the globe. Like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Quth, Mawdudi argued that Islam was not just a system of ‘some beliefs, prayers and rituals’ but a total way of life that should guide every element of an individual’s life and every aspect of their society and political culture. Muslims should seek to see sharia law respected and implemented wherever they lived and, in due course, all across the globe. Progress towards Islamicizing the whole world demanded a rejection of the West, whose values would lead only to decadence, and the embrace of jihad. Mawdudi specifically argued in his work Jihad in Islam that Islam was a ‘revolutionary concept and ideology which seeks to change and revolutionize the world social order and reshape it according to its own concept and ideals’.

When questioned by John Ware about the relevance of Mawdudi’s revolutionary message for British Muslims, Sir Iqbal Sacranie offered the Islamist idealogue an endorsement every bit as generous as those his organization has extended to Sheikhs Yassin and Qaradawi: ‘Mawdudi is a renowned scholar. I have read many of his books and I believe he is one of the scholars that I certainly feel is an inspiration to many of us. Institutions like the Islamic Foundation are playing a very important role and we are proud to have them as our affiliates.’